Hi! Nice first post, looking forward to the pics. The PIII is an ideal DOS machine in my opinion - IF it has an ISA slot. An ISA sound card is a must for DOS games, says I.

And can I humbly suggest a Windows 9x install with a boot menu to DOS 7? I do this on my PIII and it gives you the best of both worlds, because that PIII would also make a great glide / early 3D machine too.

What motherboard do you have? I'm interested in what your on board video and sound is?
I would also go for a Win9x setup. You have enough power for some of the earlier windows games, and get Dos 7 which is fine for gaming.

Unfortunately I don't think It has an ISA. I originally had Windows 98SE on the machine but I have no Idea what happened to anything other than the boot disk, as for the motherboard I will have a look ans post more specific detail later on but If it's any help it was made by the now defunct Tiny computers and is old enough to still have a Y2K compliance sticker on the front.

PCI soundcards still work well with the DOS games that fit this machine like Descent, Duke Nukem 3D, Tomb Raider, etc. It is mostly the older DOS games that are picky about PCI soundcards cards.

Duke3D has a rather famous crash issue with Live! cards 😀

30 gigabytes is awfully big for DOS. You are going to be limited to 2 gigabyte partitions.........

ncmark wrote:

30 gigabytes is awfully big for DOS. You are going to be limited to 2 gigabyte partitions.........

Not if you are using DOS 7.1...I have ran two 30GB HDD's (FAT32) with a DOS 7.1 system.

I have at the moment FreeDOS running a FAT 32 partition (so up to 2tb?),

ncmark wrote:

30 gigabytes is awfully big for DOS. You are going to be limited to 2 gigabyte partitions.........

It is the perfect partition size for a MS-DOS gaming PC using MS-DOS 7.1 and FAT32.

My Grandfather found his old copy of windows 98SE (non OEM) so I will install it, add the aforementioned hardware and take some photos this afternoon.

Thanks for the interest

If the board has the use of SB link there are a handful of PCI sound cards that will work with ISA dma.

I have good news and bad news, although predominantly good. The good news is that there is actually an ISA slot to my surprise, and both expansion cards are working. The bad news is that the Windows 98SE install failed repeatedly(corrupt sectors?). Anyway, here are the photos that I promised( taken with an Ipod so not the greatest quality).

This is the front profile of the machine:

As you can see it has a DVDROM/CDROM drive as well as a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive

These were the unmodified internals of the PC (as well as what I believe is an ISA slot in the bottom under the last PCI slot).To which I added a Geforce 2 MX 400 32 mb AGP and a Soundblaster Live! PCI Soundcard.

This is it running the opening level of Doom 2 through the SVGA output on the Geforce 2. Also I have confirmed it can run Quake 1 and Nethack.

This is the current back panel configuration(excluding the motherboard).

And finally this is the specification read out from NSSI. You won't see the sound card because I have yet to install many of the drivers from Vogons drivers, It would also be nice to know where I can find Geforce 2 drivers for DOS and If I need them.

Thanks for your interest

Nice clean build; spectacular if the machine was "found" in that condition!

Yes the bottom slot (the black one) is ISA.

Some things that come to mind:

- Have you considered adding an exhaust fan?

- What kinds of error(s) did the Windows 98 installer give you?

Not really thought about a exhaust fan really.

As for the 98se installer the error was that a good few dozen of vital drivers such as 'svgadriver.drv' or something, although I am not sure If it was that the desktop was at an angle or if the CD is dead.

chinny22 wrote:

What motherboard do you have? I'm interested in what your on board video and sound is?
I would also go for a Win9x setup. You have enough power for some of the earlier windows games, and get Dos 7 which is fine for gaming.

A Pentium III has enough power for more than "some of the earlier windows games". In fact, it has power enough for most Windows 9x games. It's only when we're moving into Win XP era games that a P3 starts getting too slow.

Tried Quake on it and it's running awesome!

for the games you want to run,get a 486DX4 or an early pentium. (preferably socket 4)

gigaraptor487 wrote:

<snip>
And finally this is the specification read out from NSSI. You won't see the sound card because I have yet to install many of the drivers from Vogons drivers, It would also be nice to know where I can find Geforce 2 drivers for DOS and If I need them.

Thanks for your interest

There are no "drivers" for the video card in DOS, it just runs. Now.. the only sort of "Drivers" are you may want to look in to some of the chipset accelerators for dos video performance for the Pentium3 series of motherboards. I don't have the links handy as it's 3am and I'm tired, I might hunt em down for you later after some sleep.

The other thing is there's a "univbe" thing that adds vesa bios extensions to a video card, but that system you have there isn't powerful enough to run the higher VESA settings for dos games anyway (800x600, 1024x768 and above.. some dos games can go up to 1280x1024), these sorts of modes generally require significant cpu power to run at 30 frames per second or higher (feels smooth when playing). So.. probably you shouldn't concern yourself with these things anyway and just enjoy dos games at their default video modes and let em run fast on your machine.

The other thing is you'll go through a lot of difficulty ever getting a PCI Live! card to even run at all in dos and even output any sound at all, I have a couple live cards and I've been trying for years to ever get either of the two running in dos with no success, even through multiple systems and different platforms. I did get "A" PCI sound card to run in dos at one point but with some funky emulation layer and it caused significant CPU slow down and made all games run slow, and the sound was horrible anyway.

Since you have an ISA slot you really should be looking for a cheap sound blaster 16 off ebay for like $5 and get "Real dos sound", with no emulation layers and far better sound quality, ease of installation, and compatibility with dos games/software.